


Darkly, Darkly

by ghostrunner



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-03
Updated: 2012-06-03
Packaged: 2017-11-06 21:06:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/423199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostrunner/pseuds/ghostrunner





	Darkly, Darkly

Her fingers are thin and chapped, purple with cold under her dirty nails. It is always cold in this room. It always smells of the sea. She has named every seagull she has seen through the bars. The mice and roaches, too.

She is ten years old.

The bells ringing midnight drown out the sound of her approach, but the door at the end of the corridor is in poor repair. Metal drags on stone and there’s a sound like a great scaled thing sliding across the wall and into a slithering heap on the ground.

Snow White stares at the cell door, the taste of the watery stew that made up her evening meal rising in her throat.

The glittering pile on the other side of the bars drags itself into a new shape like a pool of oil stretched over sticks. It laughs.

Snow White has only ever heard the queen laugh in her darkest dreams. Her imagination pales beside the real thing.

“Are you there, little rose,” she calls. Her voice is creaky and strange. Maybe. She can’t quite remember what human voices are supposed to sound like.

The queen coughs and hisses, “of course you are, where else would you be.” She doesn’t raise her head.

Snow White stares, frozen as her namesake.

“Did I ever tell you, little rose, about my mother? My mother whom I lost as you lost yours?”

Snow White says nothing. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. She is unused to speaking.

“No,” the queen answers her own question in a voice that does not match Snow White’s memories. “No, there was never time, was there?”

Her eyes are used to the darkness; she wishes they were not. The queen is wearing a dress and hooded cloak made of black feathers, or feathered scales. Stiff like leather and with an oily, iridescent sheen like sickness and smoke. It barely moves as she gathers her limbs beneath it.

“Was your mother beautiful, Snow White, before the sickness took her? I think she was. Before your father used her all up, I expect she was.”

At the mention of her father her hands hurt, suddenly; she has split the skin of her palms with her nails.

The queen lifts one pale arm that seems somehow withered. The limb of an old woman. That cannot be right; it has not been so long as that. She reaches out and traces a black iron claw along the bars of Snow White’s cell.

Snow White tries to press herself into the stone wall at her back. Crawl inside the crumbling masonry and hide between the blocks rust streaked grey granite.

“My mother was not so beautiful, little rose,” she queen whispers, her tongue like a rasp. “Not so beautiful as yours. She had a different power but it could not save her.”

She stops to cough, wet and hacking and horrible. The voice issuing forth from the stiff dark hood is more like the calls of the crows than a human woman’s. “She saved me,” says the queen, “but she could not save herself. And I could give her nothing but vengeance; I burned the heart out of the king who slew her and stole me. I burned his heart but she did not return to me.”

“I expect your mother would have tried to save you, Snow White,” she says, as though she believes this to be a comfort. Her words strident and harsh, rising in some unnamable anger. “From the horrors of this world. From the man your father would have sold you to like a cow or a bushel of _apples_ ,” she strikes with her open palm against the bars and her voice cracks like a lightning-split tree and she coughs again.

Snow White puts her hands over her ears but the sound echoes, like ripping cloth inside her head. It goes on for a long time.

The queen sags like a collapsing tent, bone and malice under oily shadow. The dark hood presses close against the bars, her iron-clawed fingertips hooked through, glinting with faceted jet.

“Don’t worry, little rose,” she says. Her voice is rough, but much more like herself, like the woman Snow White remembers. “Don’t worry, here you shall be safe from such things, too.” She smiles, maybe. At any rate there’s a glint of teeth in the shadowy space where her face must be.

She starts to rise, pulling herself up with jeweled claws in the bars and the spaces between the stones. Her cloak drags across the floor behind her with a heavy, wet slide and a slaughterhouse scent.

“Surely,” she says in a murmur like thorns and poison, “your mother would want you to be safe.”

Snow White stays in her corner, the tears on her cheeks unheeded, her hands pressed tight over her ears, but she can hear the scratch of the queen’s nails on the walls for hours after.

The queen never comes again.

\--

_fin_


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